


So Small A Thing

by cherrytart



Series: Burglarising [7]
Category: The Hobbit (2012), The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: AU, Again, Angst, Fili needs an aspirin, Other, Paladin has as big a gob as his son, and possibly a cuddle, as much as I am able to do that, bagginshield, fem!Bilbo, picking up the pace now
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-12
Updated: 2013-02-12
Packaged: 2017-11-29 02:39:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/681779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherrytart/pseuds/cherrytart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They are a small and curious party- a dwarf prince, a burglar, a gardener's son and a Took of Great Smials, but there have been odder groups, and the treasure they set out to reclaim is no less precious than the last.</p>
            </blockquote>





	So Small A Thing

**Author's Note:**

> All of you people are lovely and adorable and inspire me to keep writing. I receive your comments with much flushing and hand flapping, and my eternal gratitude is yours.   
> Another one-shot this time, and it is my theory that Pippin gets his inability to shut up from his dad and his exuberance from his mum, so I ran with that. Hope people enjoy. :)

“Should we be going that way? Only the path seems awfully steep.” The hobbit is clinging on tightly to the reins of his pony with a distasteful expression on his face, but even that cannot disguise his worry.

Fili looks at Paladin Took and sees Billa as she was before their quest. He looks and feels guilty. “Them that stole Freya won’t risk being caught.” he explains for what feels like the ninetieth time. “They’ll ride hard and fast and they won’t stop until they reach the mountain.”

“And you know this how?” shoots back Paladin, who Fili is sure still suspects him of being involved in his cousin’s abduction in spite of Billa’s naysaying.

He sighs. “Because whoever they are, they’re not stupid. They knew to come in the back door and knock me out before I realised what was what, they’d obviously been watching the house and planning on…”

“Kidnapping Freya. You’re sure you don’t know who it is took her?” Paladin asks in an undertone.

“I only know who it wasn’t, and that’s Thorin. He would not have done it in such a way, of that I am certain.” Fili says, then regrets it immediately. Partly because he isn’t sure it’s true- Thorin was not there, that he can attest to- his uncle would not have stooped as low as that, but men sent to spy on Fili were another story, and that is the scenario he is coming to suspect.

Thorin must have gotten something out of Nori, or someone had seen him and Kili talking and blabbed, because he knew his brother would never have betrayed a word of their plans, especially not to Thorin, who Kili struggles to have so much as a civil conversation with nowadays. His little brother had loved Billa dreadfully hard, and did not hide his disdain for Thorin’s actions, **could not** pretend as others did.

 “Who’s Thorin?” the Took boy asks, a sharp look in his eyes and sound in his words, breaking through Fili’s thoughts.

Fili groans a little and reigns in next to him. “My uncle.” he supplies in an undertone, checking to make quite sure that Billa cannot hear.

“What, you mean the King Atop the Mountain?” Paladin’s face scrunches up. “Why would he want to take Freya?”

“Under the mountain.” Fili corrects darkly. “And he’s her father.”

Paladin is silent for a second, and then he makes a noise like an extremely ruffled goose. “You aren’t telling me that Billa dallied with _royalty_. I can scarcely believe she would…” He protests, regaining his composure but not his balance, which Fili suspects will remain elusive all the way to Erebor.

“You question whether she was willing?” Fili asks, because although he blames Thorin down to and under the ground for what happened, that is one slight against his uncle that he will not permit.

“No, no of course not.” Paladin says hastily, tipping uncomfortably in the saddle, and ducking his head. “I meant no offense.”

Fili nods. “No harm done then.”

But he knows that he is lying, to Paladin and to himself, as he turns his eyes ahead of him to where Billa is trying to keep the irritating hobbit tween who has insisted on tagging along with them from falling from his pony. Hamfast, or whatever his name might be, is apparently the son or nephew of some sort of the Bag End gardener and had made a concentrated effort out of menacing Fili with a rake until he had consented to including him in their…

Well, what exactly this was, Fili isn’t sure. He is sure that he’d greatly prefer to have Billa alone along with him- they’d make much better time, and perhaps he’d be able to coax her out of the state she’s been in since the night Freya went missing…

*

_She never raised her voice. That was the worst part. She had screamed and he’d gone running with Primula at his heels, but apart from that one ragged noise when she’d found her daughter’s empty room, which had gone a long way to rending Fili’s heart into scraps, there was nothing. Not that he had any room to talk, since his anguish was in no way equal to hers._

_“Where is she?” Billa had asked, small and helpless by the bed, her voice nothing more than a shred of a whisper. “Fili, where’s Freya?”_

_He’d sworn under his breath and made to go to her, only to find himself suddenly slammed back against the wall, with one of his own knives digging at his throat, a pointed elbow to his gut and a pair of furious cornflower blue eyes glaring up at him._

_“Swear to me you knew nothing of this.” Primula snarled, rabid in her fury and panic. Fili could have moved her away from him easily enough, and he highly doubted that pretty, witty Primula Brandybuck had much experience in throat slitting, but he was not so much of a coward that he would refuse to answer her._

_“I swear by the Arkenstone of Thrain and the throne under the mountain, I did not, I never did.” He said thickly, and Prim gave him a smile that could have cut glass and pressed the knife in a fraction deeper. Fili felt the scar on his face start to itch._

_“By something that matters this time, dwarf.” She whispered, and he could hear Billa’s ragged breathing filling the silence, feel the agony emanating from her, deeper and stronger every second._

_This time, he looked into those blue, blue eyes, and his own voice was cracked as well. “On my brother’s life, I swear to you, if I had known I would have stopped them.”_

_“Right, well.” Primula backed away, handing the knife back almost sheepishly. “That’s better then.” She sounded almost sure, but not very._

_“No, it’s not. if Id’ve known I could have prevented it, Mahal help me.” Fili leaned his head back against the wall, knocking it back hard as Primula moved past him into Freya’s room, trying to comfort her cousin. Billa had begun to breathe in small, panicked yelps of terror and anguish, unable to comprehend her child’s absence after he, Fili had promised to keep her safe._

**_Well, you failed at that, didn’t you._ ** _Spoke a nasty voice from somewhere in the corner of his mind. **Just as you failed to keep Thorin from exiling her. As you failed to get her to Ered Luin. As you failed, failed to reach Kili when that orc almost tore him to pieces, you tried but you were too weak, you failed-**_

_Fili grit his teeth and forced those thoughts away. Nowadays, three years after the fact, his baby brother walking with a noticeable limp was the only reminder of Fili’s inability to protect him, and by Aule’s bellows it was more than enough._

_Now he had Billa’s milk white face to add to the collection of images that would never leave his mind, even if he only saw them with half the clarity others did._

_“Who was it, then?” Prim asked, and Fili only realised she was talking to him when she jerked her head in her direction, for she was kneeling with her arms wrapped around Billa, whose mouth had fallen open in a kind of wordless plea for solace._

_Solace that he could not give her._

_“I told you, I don’t know.” Fili said slowly, feeling like he is rotting from the inside out, and perhaps this is what it means to be of the line of Durin. He had never been as wild as Kili or as given to dark thoughts as Thorin, nor was he goldmad like Thror or weak minded as Thrain had grown, but maybe this was how it started._

_A night for sober thoughts, this once seemed, and Fili could not help but indulge them. He stood helpless, waiting for Billa to regain her senses, and when she rose to her feet, unsteady but composed, he was ready for shouts and accusations, for objects flung across the room and a thousand curses laid upon his head, as was met and right._

_What he did not expect was for her to drift right past him as if he were not there and go to the chest that she was fond of sitting on, the one Kili had wiped his boots on the first time they’d come through the round green door. It had been forced open, Fili saw, and its contents rifled through.  Anger curdled in his stomach, but he kept his eyes on Billa. She rooted inside the chest for  moment, then made a small, sharp sound._

_He was at her side in an instant, hand on his knife and braced for whatever it was that had stilled her. She was holding a thick red leather book in her hands, but looking at some spot inside the chest that in the dark Fili couldn’t see._

_“Billa?” he was almost afraid to speak._

_“It’s gone.” she said quietly._

_“What is?” Fili found himself stumbling over the words._

_“My…it…the book I wrote in, whilst I was with child. Nothing formal, Erestor said it might help if I…”_

**_“Erestor?”_ ** _Fili almost spat, because the only Erestor he’d ever heard of was the elven librarian Ori had not shut up about until the stone giants forced him to put  sock in it (well, Dwalin’s jealous growling might have had some hand in Ori’s subsequent silence, but really Fili thought that the giants were just as culpable)._

_“Yes.” Billa answered in an impressively toneless voice that made it clear he was to ask no further questions on the matter of elves and libraries. “Why have they done this?” she said then, her hands tightening on the red book. “My daughter, my diary…they came into my home, and they took my life.” She sounded so helpless, Fili couldn’t help but reach out and slide his arms around her._

_She did not resist, but neither did she move to embrace him in return. “We will find Freya, never fear.” he whispered. “We will go to Ered Luin, and-”_

_“Oh, I don’t think so.” The exclamation came not from the young mother tucked against his chest, but from Primula Brandybuck, who had removed to the kitchen and, for some unknowable reason, procured a copper bottomed frying pan and a wooden spoon._

_“What are you-_ ow _.” Fili reached a hand out to rub the back of his head where the wooden spoon had made sharp contact, and Primula continued smartly out of the door.”_

_“This will not stand, and I’ll not stand for it any longer, for that matter.” She said, and passed out of Fili’s sight down the garden path._

_A moment later, he heard the clang of the spoon against the base of the pan, and realised she had climbed onto Billa’s roof and was making such a racket as to wake the whole village. “Everybody up! We’re going to see the mayor, and I don’t want to hear a word of an argument from any of you! Yes Lobelia that includes you, get your fool husband and bring the pony trap while you’re about it.”_

_There was, as it happened, a great deal of protest, protest which, as Primula explained the situation, changed into angry sounds and a general mumble of discontent, the buzzing of angry bees around Bag-end. The phrases ‘well I never’ and ‘now then, what would old Bungo say’ were bandied about with increasing frequency._

_Fili though, looked at Billa, and saw in her eyes the same furious steel that had brought them to life the night she saved his idiot king of an uncle from the Pale Orc. “Bucklanders.” she huffs, straightening her skirts. “They never do things by halves.”_

_And with that, she straightened her back and followed her cousin from the cottage. Fili could do no more, given the circumstances, than tread behind her heels. Her, he would not let out of his sight._

_On the road to Michel Delving, they managed to collect quite the following, most of them personal friends of either Primula or Lobelia, and therefore apt to have large mouths and sharp tongues. What surprised and irked the prince of the lonely mountain was that Hobbits who he now knew were apt to turn their noses up at Billa for her unwed status where among them._

_Hobbits were a curious folk, and he knew not whether he admired them for their ability to put their scruples aside in the face of one of their fauntlings being taken by the dreaded unknown, or loathed them for their inaction up to this point._

_The main town of the shire was one Fili had passed through once with his brother and once alone, but he did not know his way around as well as the halflings seemed to, so he elected to stick close to Billa as the long and drawn out process known as_ sorting things out _began._

_It took three days- three days during which Tooks came from Tuckborough in force with the Thain, who looked as grim as Fili had ever seen a hobbit. During which he learned that mentioning the words 'Ered Luin' were like to get him glares and suggestions that he take himself off there alone if he thought it would solve anything._

_Brandybucks came, wielding kitchen implements, and Primula’s sister in law Dora, who threatened to give the mayor ‘a good clout’ if he did not keep his office open past closing time, was a constant fixture._

_Thorin’s nephew found himself threatened more than once with a ‘stay in the lockholes.’ Billa had to speak up, or he fancied he would’ve been at risk of that and more, not to mention a mauling from a tiny hobbit child that he learned was called Merry, and it’s equally rambunctuos mother (a Took, to Fili’s underwhelmed surprise), both of whom had taken umbrage at the news of Freya’s abduction._

_It took arguing, and haggling, a great deal of mess and noise, one near impalement and Paladin Took climbing atop a windmill to address the small mob (and propose marriage to a spindly, curly haired hobbit lass who squealed and jumped on him in response) before they were ready and decided to pursue the Mahal cursed bastards who had taken his cousin._

_Fili felt the need for vengeance thrumming in his blood, and wondered if Billa shared it. She was quiet and anxious during those days, her eyes fixed on the blot of the horizon, not truly there but trying to be wherever her daughter was._

_And so it transpired that on the first day of winter that two very important pieces of paper were signed in the Shire mayor’s office at Michel Delving, and read before what seemed to Fili to be the entire population of all four farthings._

_One was the first calling of the bans of marriage between Paladin Took and Eglantine Banks, to be commenced upon his eventual return to the Shire, and was met with a few grumbles, but garnered general satisfied nods. The other, a far more sombre document, was met with either dark cheers or determined silence, and it was of the like that had not been seen in the Shire for more than an age._

_*_

The day they reach the misty mountains, it starts to snow. Billa lifts her face skywards and lets the flakes fall on her face. She had danced in the snow once, Fili remembers, flakes in her wheaten hair and Thorin’s eyes on her back, around the trees outside the skin changers hall.

“Are you with me, Fili son of Vili?” she asks when he draws his pony up next to hers. The use of his father’s name, which she must have got from Kili, is a sharper blow than any he has been dealt in battle.

And he knows with certainty that she has used it to call on him not as Thorin Oakenshield’s sister son or as a prince under the mountain, but as her last, best and only hope. Her child’s only hope.

He cannot fail her. “Du Bekar.” he replies, and something like a smile appears on his face _. To arms._ Into battle. Mahal knows they will need it.

“Yes. Du Bekar.” she says, a little savagely, and Fili finds himself, as well as missing his brother and worrying over Freya and being sure the damned Gamgee boy is going to tip himself into a ravine before this journey is over; turning a quick look skywards and gritting his teeth.

_I hope you’re ready, uncle. Because if you sent those men, if you took her child, there’s no power on Middle-earth that’ll see fit to spare you._

**Author's Note:**

> Oh, Bagginshield. You are my OTP, so why do I enjoy hurting you so...  
> Fili's dad is hereby named Vili in this verse, because I read it once in a fic I cannot for the life of me remember and it just sort of grabbed me.   
> Oh, and before I forget, Ewelock on tumblr made Burglarising art and it is fantastic, can be found on my blog (disgracedbakewell, under the art/fic tags) and theirs. Once again, all of the awards are due and I really can't believe so many talented and amazing people like this fic. Ta.


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